


Spaceman

by gersaint



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry VI - Shakespeare, Historical RPF
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angels, Gen, Hallucinations, Mental Health Issues, Religion, Supernatural Elements, Visions, it's a metaphor for his actual mental break in 1453, or are they?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26393233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gersaint/pseuds/gersaint
Summary: Professor Henry Lancaster receives some unusual visitors.
Relationships: Henry VI/Marguerite d'Anjou | Henry VI/Margaret of Anjou
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Spaceman

**Author's Note:**

> There was supposed to be more of this but it never went anywhere, so have this little snapshot instead. Title taken from a song of the same name by The Killers.

Professor Henry Lancaster drank incredibly strong tea. Earl Grey was his favorite. He was in his office at the prestigious (though rather somnolent) Plantagenet University, mechanically sipping his tea and grading some mediocre papers on Shakespeare’s vastly underrated _King John_.

There was a sound like that of a harp string breaking: clear, thin, and bright. Henry looked up. Immediately, he found himself obliged to spill nearly all the contents of his teacup all over himself and, more unfortunately, his desk. Luckily, when the angels appeared to him, the tea had long since lost all semblance of being hot.

The three of them – Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael – were very clearly standing in Henry’s office, wearing fine white robes that pooled on the floor around their feet. In a moment of sheer silliness brought on by surprise and hysteria, Henry could not help but be reminded of the three York brothers: after a particularly wild party last semester, they had stood before him much in this fashion, mumbling inebriated apologies in togas made of dormitory curtains. But a closer look revealed that these winged beings here were not standing at all. They were nowhere near to touching the floor. In fact, they were floating.

Henry considered fainting, but thought better of it. Instead, he rubbed his temples and tried not to think about the cold tea soaking his trousers.

“Er… good afternoon,” he said. The words that crept out of his mouth sounded frightfully awkward, but Henry really didn’t know what else to say to a glowing trio of archangels. (The faint golden aura emanating from them was rather like the fluorescent light found in any ordinary building, but somehow purer. It was quite calming.)

The archangel in the middle – which one it was exactly, Henry had no idea – was the first to speak. “Good afternoon, professor,” it said in astonishingly clear Queen’s English.

“Good afternoon,” said the other two archangels.

All three of them smiled in a charmingly restrained sort of way. It reminded Henry of the stewardesses at Heathrow, of all things.

“Yes. Um. Good afternoon to you,” Henry said again. “Is there –”

“Anything you can help us with, professor?” interrupted the archangel who had spoken first. It – _he_ – had a sharp and almost stormy face, with high-arching brows, intense black eyes, and a tiny smirk playing upon his lips. “Indeed there is. But it would be rude of us not to introduce ourselves, would it not? And so, I am the archangel Gabriel.”

“I am Michael,” said the archangel to Gabriel’s right. This one had a kinder face: his brown eyes seemed almost apologetic, and his long curved nose and slightly cleft chin gave him the appearance of a saintly sculpture. “Of course, you already knew who we are, more or less. It’s just the matter of telling us apart. Right?”

Henry found himself nodding.

The third archangel gave a light, musical laugh, presumably at Henry’s most amusing and fish-like facial expression. “Well, then,” he said, “I must be Raphael. And, the last time I checked, I was.” Raphael had dreamy-looking golden eyes and an extremely Grecian profile; his rounded boyish face made him seem considerably younger than the other two archangels, though he was as many thousands of years old as they were. All three of them had long dark waterfalls of hair, and skin the color of sun-burnished desert sands; they were certainly nothing like the porcelain creatures usually depicted on church ceilings. There was one thing the ceilings had gotten right, though: the archangels’ wings were sleeker, whiter, and more perfectly feathery than that of any swan.

“It’s… very nice to meet you all,” said Henry. “I suppose – I suppose that _my_ name is –”

“Henry Lancaster,” Gabriel interrupted again. “Yes, we know.”

“Oh.” Henry started to get up: he wasn’t sure what the proper etiquette was around archangels, but still, he figured it was only polite to stand up. But then he remembered that he’d spilled tea on himself.

“It’s just tea,” he said, gesturing helplessly to the teacup on the desk.

“We saw,” said Michael.

“Here, let me help you with that,” said Raphael. The archangel lifted an impossibly graceful hand, moved it upward through the air as if waving away an embarrassing conversation topic, and all of a sudden Henry’s trousers were dry again. As was his desk, thank God.

“Um. Thank you. That really was helpful.”

Raphael shrugged like a feather dancing in a breeze. “My pleasure.”

“Ahem,” said Gabriel. “So, as I said, we should like to talk to you, Henry Lancaster. It is of rather great importance.”

“Very great indeed,” added Michael.

“You could even say the greatest,” chimed Raphael.

“It is a message from God,” concluded Gabriel.

It was at this point that Henry realized he should probably offer something to these messengers of God. Something to drink – did Heavenly beings drink anything? Or at least a place to sit down, for God’s sake.

“Oh, yes, of course, of course. I – I’d very much like to hear whatever it is that God has to, er, say to me. But first, would any of you, um, like something?”

The archangels responded with blank stares.

Henry elaborated, “You know, to eat or drink or…? No? Well, then, you must at least sit down. Please.”

He looked wildly around for a chair, but found none. There was barely enough space in his office for his own solitary desk and armchair.

Gabriel held up a glowing hand. “Sit down, Henry Lancaster, and worry yourself not. We are perfectly and eternally content.”

“But thanks anyway,” said Michael.

“By the way, have you got a stutter or something, professor?” asked Raphael.

“Er, no. I – I haven’t.”

“You stuttered just now, though.”

Henry laughed nervously and with a touch of desperation. “Well, you see, I – I’ve never met any angels, arch or not. So, naturally, I’m a bit…”

“Mortified? Terrified?” said Raphael.

“Absolutely dumbstruck?” offered Michael.

They seemed to be having great fun.

Henry began to mumble something again, but was mercifully spared from having to reply: the whole room suddenly shuddered as if a bolt of lightning had passed through it, which was more or less what happened. The lamp hanging from the ceiling swung back and forth like a pendulum – the very walls shook – the teacup nearly (but not quite) fell off the desk.

“Enough!” thundered Gabriel, his silken voice suddenly filling the whole room. The other two archangels, who had scattered to the corners of the room with their feathers slightly ruffled, looked down at the floor. “Sit _down_ , professor.”

Henry sat down.

“You are going to change the world, Henry Lancaster,” Gabriel continued in a softer voice. “You shall and you must. God wills it.”

The archangel paused for an endless moment. Henry silently berated his heart for breaking the silence. (Or was he the only one here who heard it beating? Most likely not.) When his voice returned to him, he could only manage one short, pathetic word.

“How?”

“Alas, even we do not know that yet. God has not seen it fit to inform us. But They have a great purpose for you, and for you only.”

“We will not leave you alone to your destiny, however,” said Michael. “We will help you.”

“You can count on us, professor,” said Raphael. Henry thought he saw him wink.

“Indeed you can,” said Gabriel, nodding with proper solemnity. “Do not try to do anything by yourself before we appear to you again. Everyone in the Kingdom of Heaven knows what terrible consequences there are every time a mortal tries to interpret God’s will by himself.”

“I understand,” said Henry, even though he did not understand at all. In fact, he understood less with every passing second. “But – but _when_ will I see you again?”

“You shall see us when you shall see us,” answered Gabriel.

Henry’s face must have betrayed the divine despair he felt at that moment, because Michael glided over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. It felt comfortingly warm and refreshingly cool at the same time.

“Be at peace,” said Michael. “If you need a sign of our arrival, look for a cloud of smoke.”

“And for a patch of ice,” added Raphael.

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “When the cloud of smoke and the patch of ice come together, you shall see us again, and you shall hear more of God’s will. Until then, Henry Lancaster, goodbye.”

The sound of the broken harp string rang again in the air, and then the archangels were gone.

Henry slumped in his chair. For what seemed like several minutes, he didn’t even blink. There was no sign of any spilled tea anywhere. But when he looked down at his teacup, it was empty.

*

That evening, Henry both longed for and dreaded the thought of going to sleep. Longed for it because it had been an exceedingly long day. Dreaded it because, indeed, only God knew what kind of dreams Henry would see. So it came as a half-relief when his girlfriend Margaret came home in the mood to grumble about her students yet again. She was the youngest (and scariest) professor in Plantagenet University. Completely against his better judgement, Henry had asked her out a few months ago; and completely against _her_ better judgment, Margaret had accepted.

“I swear,” Margaret growled, “the next time I hear a student ask, ‘are we ever going to use this in real life,’ I’ll make them make eat an algebra textbook.”

“But you don’t teach algebra,” said Henry. He felt as though he were speaking through an infinite haze of – of something hazy. He hoped that Margaret couldn’t tell.

“Oh, whatever,” she grumbled. “Usually they say it about mathematics, but if I had a quarter for every time someone said it about history, I’d have enough to buy Donald Trump’s hairpiece.” She scoffed theatrically.

“Hm,” Henry mumbled. “I mean, yes, dear.”

Margaret regarded him with a slight frown. “Is there something wrong, Henry?”

“What? No! Nothing. Nothing at…”

He was about to say “nothing at all,” but Margaret’s expression got more disbelieving with each word he said.

“I think it is something,” she said.

“I promise that it’s nothing.”

“Well, I don’t believe you.”

Henry shrugged.

“And I’m not going to leave you alone until you tell me,” Margaret added.

“Can’t a man just be absent-minded?”

“He can, I suppose, and your head _is_ almost always in the clouds. But you’re a terrible liar. You are not just absent-minded right now.”

It continued more or less in this vein all throughout dinner. Margaret was excellent at prying into other people’s business, but Henry was almost comically good at fending off every single one of her questions; of course, nothing he said or did could make her any less curious, but he succeeded in annoying her to the point of breaking off her investigation for a time.

Eventually, Margaret went to bed. Henry didn’t. When Margaret eyed him significantly at this, he muttered something about having _a lot of papers to grade, you know how it is, just go to bed without me_. Again, this did not convince Margaret in the slightest, but at that point she was far too tired to do anything other than yawn indulgently and go upstairs to the bedroom. (Only upon reaching the topmost step on the staircase did a drop of worry creep into her thoughts: what if this “something-nothing” was a serious matter? _Oh well_ , she thought, _I’ll pester him again in the morning. Maybe I’ll have better luck then_.)

So Henry was left alone in the living room. The very first thing he did – before he even thought about thinking about all the things he had to think about – was make himself a cup of tea, putting in two packets for good measure. That done, he went back to the living room, set the cup carefully on the coffee table, and promptly collapsed onto the couch. He then proceeded to stare blankly at the ceiling for twenty minutes.

He had never realized (until now) what a tasteful color the living room ceiling was. It was a sort of white-beige. Very complacent, very unobstructive. ( _Like you_ , Margaret would probably say, if she could hear his thoughts.)

But no matter how fascinating the ceiling was, Henry could not avoid the fact of the matter. And the fact of the matter was that he was only thirty-two and had already managed to go completely insane.

Angels. He’d seen angels. In his office. On a Tuesday evening.

Handsome angels.

Handsome angels who spoke the Queen’s English.

Henry sighed a good, long sigh. He sat up and took a sip of his tea; to his slight dismay, it was already cold. Again.

 _Angels_. Now, he came from a Catholic family, and he’d always been more religious than, say, most of his friends or coworkers. He went to church every week and genuinely liked it. He knew the Bible well. (Which, aside from religious purposes, also happened to come in handy for teaching literature – you can’t walk two steps through the hallowed halls of the Western literary canon, he’d found, without bumping into a Biblical allusion or theme of some sort.) He even prayed, and not just when something was troubling him. A bit self-consciously, Henry reached into his shirt and pulled out the small silver cross that he always wore on a thin chain around his neck; he held it in the palm of his hand and stared at it, half-expecting it to transmute into a talking dinosaur or something before his very eyes. But it didn’t. Luckily.

God was real – Henry was reasonably sure of that – but still, though, angels? Really? He’d been called credulous or gullible or foolish at various times in his life by various people, but even he wasn’t that much of a moron. Was he?

No. No, he wasn’t. The only explanation was that, well, he was a loon.

And yet… maybe… maybe it was just the sleep deprivation. Or the excessive amounts of caffeine. Or, perhaps, the stress brought on by having to flip through pages upon pages upon pages of poorly-constructed arguments (and even more poorly-constructed sentences) – maybe it all had finally caught up to him.

No, that wasn’t a satisfactory explanation. If it was the case, he should have gone off the rails quite a while ago. Henry had been flipping through academic nonsense for years, and he had long since developed mental immunity to such things.

Besides, it had been an awfully long and awfully _specific_ hallucination.

Perhaps it had all been a dream?

What about the empty teacup, then? Had he finished his tea and then dreamt that he’d spilled it everywhere? But he didn’t remember waking up from anything: usually, when he dozed off in his office, he would wake up with some paperwork stuck to his forehead, and with a terrible cramp in at least one place. Everything had been pretty seamless this evening. Most of all, he could remember how he’d gotten there, which is impossible in dreams. Henry remembered, with abundant clarity, how he’d walked into his office after a particularly boring day, made himself tea, sat down, picked up a pen, and immediately prophesied a dismal grade for the first essay he looked at. (Yes, it had been one of those essays whose grade is apparent from the very first page – nay, the first _paragraph_ – but he’d read it anyway, of course. And then, with a nice pang of remorse, he’d written a great big F on the first page, as he’d predicted he would.)

And then the harp string had sounded, and the angels had appeared.

 _A mission from God_.

“Yes, I’m definitely insane,” Henry said to nobody in particular.


End file.
